On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 9:19 PM, Platonides <platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Regarding "keeping the big header is
important", I don't think anyone
barely into CS on this century can not know what the GPL is (and not
figure out in 5 minutes).
An excerpt like this would be perfectly fine imho:
«This MediaWiki file is licensed under the terms of GPL 2 or later, as
published in
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl2 See the COPYING file for
details.»
It has nothing to do with whether or not they know the GPL. As the FLC link
explains, it is about clearly conveying that the code is indeed copyrighted
under a certain license, such that somebody who violates the license cannot
claim innocence or otherwise try and push some of the blame onto us.
That said, I really don't think bikeshedding over reducing a license header
from 4 lines of text to 2 lines really makes a difference. I'd much rather
use the format advised by GNU itself, considering they did write the
license.
(As for the whole warranty disclaimer, which takes up its own 4 lines, I do
not know enough to argue for or against whether it is necessary, since
software liability is a separate legal device from copyright.)
*-- *
*Tyler Romeo*
Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016
Major in Computer Science